The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost

ebook Reading against the Grain · The Nineteenth Century Series

By Jonathon Shears

cover image of The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost

Sign up to save your library

With an OverDrive account, you can save your favorite libraries for at-a-glance information about availability. Find out more about OverDrive accounts.

   Not today

Find this title in Libby, the library reading app by OverDrive.

Download Libby on the App Store Download Libby on Google Play

Search for a digital library with this title

Title found at these libraries:

Library Name Distance
Loading...
The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost offers a new critical insight into the relationship between Milton and the Romantic poets. Beginning with a discussion of the role that seventeenth and eighteenth-century writers like Dryden, Johnson and Burke played in formulating the political and spiritual mythology that grew up around Milton, Shears devotes a chapter to each of the major Romantic poets, contextualizing their 'misreadings' of Milton within a range of historical, aesthetic, and theoretical contexts and discourses. By tackling the vexed issue of whether Paradise Lost by its nature makes available and encourages alternate readings or whether misreadings are imposed on the poem from without, Shears argues that the Romantic inclination towards fragmentation and a polysemous aesthetic leads to disrupted readings of Paradise Lost that obscure the theme, or warp the 'grain', of the poem. Shears concludes by examining the ways in which the legacy of Romantic misreading continues to shape critical responses to Milton's epic.
The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost